


Halley's Comet and Other Extenuating Circumstances

by clarketomylexa



Series: clexaweek2019 [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, American Football, Cheerleader Clarke Griffin, Clexa Week 2019, F/F, Nerd Lexa, clarke tries to get her to come to one, gus is the ultimate shipper, lexa doesn't like football games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2019-11-07 17:55:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17965355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clarketomylexa/pseuds/clarketomylexa
Summary: “If you ever did want to go to a game I’d be happy to give you a ride,” Clarke posits when Lexa has all but given up on her saying anything at all. “I know Anya can take you, but if you’re ever at a loose end.”“Football isn’t really my scene,” Lexa smiles apologetically at the cheerleader.Clarke laughs. “I gathered.” She hovers for a moment longer, as if waiting. “The offer stands,” she finally says.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For clexa week 2019 day five nerd/popular. It isn't my best work because I started and finished it at 2am last night but I hope it's okay!

The town stops for game day. 

The post office closes early, which may or may not be a federal offence and the football players—rowdy and egging each other on with their letterman jackets slung around their shoulders—are excused from last period early. But perhaps the worst casualty of gameday fever is the library, which closes early on Friday afternoon because Mrs Rodriguez's grandson plays wide-receiver on the team and she hasn’t missed a game of his since he was eight-years-old. 

It leaves Lexa with precious few places where she can revise Spanish conjugations without being interrupted by people decked out in green, white and yellow and frankly, it’s stupid. For a phenomenon that occurs every week, it’s hardly worth the fuss it entails, especially when Lexa’s proposal to the city council for a town-wide blackout in preparation for Halley’s Comet in forty years time was turned down as quickly as she submitted it. 

“Did you know that it reflects 4% of the sunlight it receives,” she says, carefully writing out the present participle of the words listed in the assigned page of her textbook. Technically the pages aren’t due until Tuesday—her Spanish teacher is lenient with homework at best and in the habit of forgetting he set it at worst—but she has AP History to study for on Sunday and Anya is dragging her out on Saturday for some ‘sister bonding’ under the guise of a house party Lexa doesn’t want to go to. 

“What does?” 

“The Comet.” 

Disgruntled, a heavy-set man emerges from beneath the counter of the diner, oil-stained rag tucked into the pocket of his jeans. Gus was swoon-worthy in his day her mother would tell her over the dinner table while her father dropped his jaw, positively appalled. He was the quarterback for the championship-winning team in 1986 and was on a football scholarship to Ohio State until an injury put a kibosh on his NFL career and he was forced to return home with his tail between his legs and a bad disposition. The years of frowning have aged him and taken a toll on his hairline but his hatred for anything resembling football means he has become Lexa’s Friday night company and unlike her classmates, he has never once complained about her ‘fun facts’. 

Anya says they deserve each other. 

“‘S that right?” He grunts, wiping his hands on the rag and assessing his handiwork. 

Lexa nods. “It only shines bright when it’s close enough to the sun for its dust and vapours to be burnt off.” She watches Jack frown at the still-leaking sink and leans on her elbows to peer over the counter. “Do you want me to take a look?” 

“What‘re you going to do? Advanced Spanish the leak out of it?”

Lexa rolls her eyes but, point taken, she concedes. 

Manual labour is not her strong point. 

He resolves that he will have to call in the plumber on Monday and makes a note for himself to stick above the decrepit coffee machine that is still hanging onto life. Whenever she works the morning shift, she dreads the moment someone will ask for a cup of coffee because she is sure that today is the day it will give out on her completely and leave her with a mob of un-caffeinated townspeople on her hands. 

“Can I get you another milkshake?” 

She nods and slides a neat five-dollar bill over the counter. 

More fool him for perpetuating her sugar addiction. 

They both look to the door as the bell rings obnoxiously to signal the entrance of five girls clad in the green, white and yellow of the high schools cheerleading uniform and instinctively, Lexa goes to pull her belongings closer to her, resting her elbows on the counter and pulling herself inwards as they walk by and claim the booth by the window. If Gus sees the way her cheeks flush miserably, he has the good grace not to mention it. 

He takes their order and sets Lexa’s second milkshake down next to her Spanish notebook before serving the girls their diet root-beer floats in five tall glasses and returning to the counter. Lexa stares at him as she listens to the mindless chatter—one of them has found a bar in town that doesn’t card, another got sent to the councillors office for a lecture on ‘appropriate behaviour on school grounds’ after she got busted making out with her boyfriend behind the gym. It makes Lexa want to pound her head in and by the look on Gus’s face, the diner owner feels the same. 

She has always found it hard to connect with people. 

It’s something that she seems come so naturally to her peers but whenever she went up to someone at recess in elementary school the ‘hi my name is’ and ‘can I play with you’ felt forced and awkward and ultimately would find her chickening out of a conversation she had initiated. Her father told her she was just ‘wired differently’ after she came to him in the third grade after a weekend researching into antisocial personality disorder. And although admittedly, she was relieved to find out she wasn’t a psychopath, she couldn't help but think how unfair it was that out of a family of philanthropists, doctors and cheer captains, she had to be the one person who was average. 

She tried her best not to be average—student government, debate team, six AP classes and two advanced ones—but so far, all it has done is entrench her further in a type of anonymity that she can’t seem to shake. 

And she does want to shake it. 

“Hi, Lexa.” 

Wide-eyed and calming the throbbing tattoo of her heart, Lexa slaps a hand over her notebook before turning to the voice. November is waning and Clarke is wearing the long-sleeved uniform top prescribed for cold weather—she knows it because of the number of times she has had to pick it up off of the floor of the laundry after Anya comes home from practice. But paired with the usual pleated mini skirt that Anya, as captain, petitioned to make shorter purely for stunting reasons and not the glee of seeing her little sister spontaneously combust at the sight of her crush, it makes her sip of shake grow solid lodge itself in her throat like a non-nucloneon fluid. 

“Hi, Clarke.” 

“You’re not coming to the game?”    
Lexa knows she’s being polite; she hasn’t gone to a game since she was twelve years old. 

“Spanish homework,” she shakes her head, “you?” 

Clarke piques a brow and it takes a moment before she realises her mistake. She tugs the neck of her sweater, suddenly feeling hot beneath the knit of her turtleneck. “Sorry,” she blanches.

Clarke waves her hand as if to say ‘don’t worry about it’ and on the contrary, Lexa knows it will be weighing on her mind for the next week. For all the time she spends sitting on the bleachers staring at Clarke in uniform as she waits for Anya to finish practice, you would think she would remember what it stands for. 

Clarke drums her nails delicately on the counter even after Gus has given her change for the fifty she used to cover her table and Lexa tries not to think that she is stuck on something. She blew her chance with Clarke when she chewed Anya out in front of the entire squad for bringing twenty-one girls home for a post-try-outs slumber party without telling her, in her Pikachu pyjama pants and middle school track and field t-shirt. 

“If you ever did want to go to a game,” Clarke posits when Lexa has all but given up on her saying anything at all, “I would be happy to give you a ride.” She smiles patting Lexa on the hand. “I know Anya can take you but if you’re ever at a loose end.” 

“Football isn’t really my scene,” Lexa smiles apologetically. 

“I gathered,” Clarke laughed. 

She hovers for a moment longer. 

“The offer still stands,” she says. 

Her friends call her from the door and she disappears down the steps, car-keys swinging from her fingers before Lexa can reply, and she sits on her barstool feeling shell shocked. Her cheeks are ruddy and she digs her chin into the lip of her sweater, retreating behind brushed wool like she would solid Teflon and if he notices, Gus has the good grace not to say anything, allowing her a moment of grace before wiping the counter down with a dish towel. 

“You don’t have to stay on my account,” she says as nonchalantly as he knows how, “if you want to go, go.” 

Lexa thinks Gus should stick to being the strong silent type. 

“I don’t,” she says miserably. 

He purses his lips in silence as she cants her chin up to fix him with an intent stare, unblinking from behind round glasses. 

“I don’t.” 

He sighs a long-suffering sigh and slings the dish-towel over his shoulder.

“Have it your way.”

* * *

 

The four o’clock crowd wanes to a lone man in a tartan scarf, furiously avoiding the football stats in the Tribune like a plaque—a kindred spirit Lexa thinks—and Lexa is grateful she is working a shift if only because waiting tables and keeping Gus from throwing the panini press out of the window, cord and all, takes her mind off the fact that Clarke hasn’t come in for her pregame diet root beer float. 

It’s the first time in a year and a half Lexa hasn’t spent her Friday afternoon watching the gaggle of cheerleaders in the window booth push being at the high school at the time Anya insists they be there to warm up and her absence is unsettling. Especially because, in the space of a week, Lexa has talked herself into saying yes should Clarke ask if she wants a ride again. 

She busies herself with calculus revision as Gus meanders past to wipe down the counter. 

“You stare at that book any longer and you’ll become a differential equation.” 

“I’m surprised you know what that is,” she fires back without looking up. 

“Don’t take your anger out on me because your girlfriend missed your date.” 

“She isn’t my girlfriend.” 

Gus mutters something that sounds like ‘damn teenagers’ under his breath as he takes a basket of french fries to the table in the corner and Lexa pretends not to hear.

* * *

 

He lets her buy a burger and fries with a twenty from the till when the diner is empty. It comes with a lukewarm Cherry Coke that had been miss-poured earlier but she sips with nonetheless as she moves from calculus to AP English, pasting her customer service smile on when the bell rings and looking up from her notes to find Clarke standing in the doorway, the sight of her making Lexa do a double take. 

Her hair is scraped up into a high ponytail—the prescribed three-inches from her hairline as set by Anya in the team handbook—but strays fall listlessly about her face as casualties of their half-time routine and her cheeks are pink. She has a thrift-store windbreaker on over her uniform and bare legs, her fingers wound around the strap of the bag she has slung over her shoulder. 

“What can I get you?” Lexa schools herself, shoving her burger beneath the lip of the counter. 

Clarke slides a five dollar bill over the counter with a smile, “a root beer float please,” she says. 

“Just you?” 

“We won,” she nods, as though it’s an explanation, “everyone went out.” 

“Not you?” 

Clarke shakes her head and Lexa watches her temper a sly grin between vanilla ice-cream out of the tub with shovelling it into a glass. It leaves Lexa hot for a reason she doesn’t want to get into in the middle of her workplace but Clarke clearly doesn’t have the same concerns. “I have Spanish homework,” she has the audacity to say, leaving Lexa red-cheeked and staring. 

It takes Gus prying Clarke’s change out of the till before Lexa comes back to herself, fully aware that Clarke doesn’t take Spanish and shellshocked nevertheless. Clarke is staring at her in a way that Lexa can’t decipher and it is making her anxious—more than anxious even: clammy and horribly underdressed in her school clothes and cloth apron. 

“Lexa can sit with you,” Gus says, sliding the drink over the counter beneath Lexa’s nose. 

“I’m working,” Lexa replies immediately, voice edging up an octave in sheer panic. 

“She’s off the clock.” 

Gus pats her on the back with a hulking hand, steering them to a booth and Lexa sits opposite Clarke, picking at the hem of her jeans with fingers that won’t seem to cooperate, eyes sliding anxiously to the way Clarke purses her lips around her straw. 

“I can get another straw,” she offers, licking ice cream off of her top lip. 

Lexa shakes her head. “I’m sorry about Gus,” she inclines her head towards the man who is not-so-subtly wiping down the section of the counter he has been wiping down for the last three minutes, “he takes his duties as pseudo-father too seriously.”    
“I heard that,” he grumbles. 

Chagrinned, Lexa ducks her head. 

“I don’t mind,” Clarke tells her, “it’s nice.” 

“Really?”    
She nods, grin widening. 

“I don’t get to see you like this. You’re always so serious.” 

“I don’t like Fridays,” Lexa says plainly. 

Clarke looks at her in open-mouthed reproach as she licks a stripe up her vanilla ice-cream covered straw. “Who doesn’t like Friday’s?” 

“I find the town-wide shut-downs troubling.”    
“But they’re okay if they’re for a ‘once-in-a-lifetime astrological event’,” Clarke recites gleefully. 

Lexa winces. “You remember that.”

“Do I remember the thirteen-year-old who got up in front of the city council to demand they make allowances for a comet that will only be visible in forty years time?” she piques a brow and Lexa’s cheeks grow hot. She wishes the floor would open up and swallow her whole, looking everywhere but at Clarke who is laughing, a soft, husky laugh that is so incredibly different to what Lexa hears when she listens to Clarke giggle about the football players and college boys every Friday afternoon, obnoxiously loud and angling for attention. 

“If it’s any consolation I think it’s nice,” her voice softens when she sees Lexa’s reaction and she slides a hand across the table, fingers stopping just short of where Lexa’s rest and Lexa has it i her to feel disappointed. “I like that you’re so passionate about things,” she says, achingly earnest, “the world is a pretty boring place without it.” 

She’s so succinct. It could be a fact in a textbook and just for that, Lexa feels compelled to believe it, leaning in eagerly to the husk of her voice and the easy messiness of her appearance that renders her less god in human form and more fallen star. It occurs to her English teacher would tell her she is being too liberal with her metaphors but just this once, Lexa can’t bring herself to care about what a teacher would say. 

“I wish it was sooner,” she says softly. 

Clarke lifts her focus from the melting ice-cream of her float, lips pursed around her straw so that Lexa can see the shine of her lip gloss. 

“What?”    
“Halley’s comet,” Lexa finishes her train of thought with red cheeks. “I wish I didn’t have to wait,” she admits. “I want to go camping, somewhere like Nevada, I want to see it properly.”    
“Nevada?” Clarke whistles, “you’d miss calculus.” 

“That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”    
“What would your perfect attendance record say about that?” Clarke wonders, teasing. 

Lexa shrugs. 

“It’s an extenuating circumstance.”

* * *

 

“Gus, please,” Lexa whines, textbooks tucked beneath her arm, backpack over her shoulders and nearly desperate at this point, a pout newly affixed to her lips that had been cemented there through no fault of her own. Or perhaps it was the fault of her own, but in truth, she hadn’t spoken to Clarke since Gus had shoved them unceremoniously together in a booth the Friday before and as far as she was concerned she wasn’t going to again. 

She had had her five minutes and it was enough to last a lifetime. 

Clarke however, had other intentions and when she approached Lexa in third-period calculus, pulling her book over to Lexa’s desk under the guise of asking for help in an otherwise silent classroom, Lexa had jumped out of her skin. 

“This is me asking you to come,” she had said, not cocky but she had an air about her that said she was used to getting what she wanted, “so now you have to.” 

She slipped Lexa a note later that said she didn’t have to go if she really didn’t want to but by that time, Lexa was too busy planning for the worst to let it sink in. 

She had panicked. 

No one ever said she was a functioning excuse for a human being. 

“You work any more shifts and I’m going to run out of money to give you,” Gus grumbles, hand on her back as he guides her towards the door, deflecting every effort she makes to put her books down on a table. 

She ducks under his arm and turns to face him. “I’ll work for free,” she wagers. 

He walks her outside onto the stoop and stands in the doorway, hand on the door jam, and looks at her sagely. 

“It’s not a trap,” he says after a moment. 

Lexa’s heart loosens in her chest at his works and she thinks he might be smarter than he gives himself credit for. 

“How do you know?”    
“I have eyes,” he scoffs, rubbing a hand over his face like she is giving him a headache. By the frequency of the movement, she thinks she does it a lot. “You do too,” he says when she doesn’t seem to understand. “And you’ve been using them to moon over Clarke since you were fifteen-years-old.” Lexa is indignant at that. “Today, she invited you to the game and if I have to sit there,” he jabs a finger towards the counter, “and watch you look miserable for another week I may just sell up and force you out.” 

Lexa swallows and adjusts the weight of her books in her arms and he softens. 

“Go see your girlfriend, Lexa.” 

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Lexa grumbles. 

* * *

 

She goes to the game. 

She doesn’t know what else to do. 

It’s loud and bright, and the absolute opposite of what she thought she would be doing with her evening but she makes the most of it. She sits halfway up the bleachers with her clear-file of physics revision in her lap and pretends that she isn’t bothered every time the family next to her launches themselves to their feet at the sight of their son with the ball. 

After half-time, Clarke pulls Anya aside and points up the bleachers to where Lexa is sitting. She can see the frown on her sisters face slowly melt into something devilish and wants to throw herself to the ground and hide but before she can, Clarke is bounding up the metal stairs and shimmying her way down the row to the empty seat next to Lexa. Her hair is neat but her cheeks are red and there is sweat clinging to her hairline. She grabs Lexa’s forearm with a dazzling smile. 

“You came,” she beams.    
“You invited me,” Lexa replies dumbly. 

Clarke smiles a small, secret smile and Lexa finds herself wondering if it is for her.  

“I thought football wasn’t your scene,” she levers herself into the spare seat, so close that Lexa can feel the heat of her through her coat. 

Anya looks up with a wacky thumbs-up, to which of them, Lexa doesn’t know. 

All she does know is that she isn’t on speaking terms with her anymore and her cheerleading top is going to get an unfortunate soak in bleach the next time she leaves it on the floor of the laundry room. 

She looks at Clarke and smiles. 

“It was an extenuating circumstance.” 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for day 6 of clextober 2019

The diner is empty. 

The laminated sign in the window — decorated for the season with one, shiny, pumpkin sticker grinning jovially — reads ‘open’ in black, block letters but this early, people are still respecting what they think is common courtesy and staying away until a more agreeable hour. Which is fine by Lexa because she gets paid either way; whether she’s pouring coffee or finishing the Calculus B homework Clarke lured her away from last night — cheeks flushed and still in her uniform from practice—in a booth in the corner. She runs a finger over the mauve bruise on her jaw at the thought. 

(If Gus has noticed, he’s had the grace not to say anything). 

“Did you know Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system?” 

“No.” 

“It has the average surface temperature of four-hundred and fifty degrees Celsius.” 

“That makes sense,” Clarke says: “‘Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus’.”

“Are you saying that the temperature of a planet six-hundred and twelve miles away is dictated by your sexual preferences?” 

“Are you calling yourself hot?” 

Clarke grins — game set and match — and Lexa feels herself falling for her a little harder. 

In the month since Clarke invited her to the game, her life has become a John Huges cliché; they have graduated from car-pooling to holding hands to kissing beneath the bleachers after cheer-practice and it’s safe to say it has given Lexa whiplash. Not the bad kind though—if there is such a thing—but the kind that she imagines you would get if you got on a roller coaster without strapping in, or even expecting to get on a roller coaster in the first place. 

Clarke is her roller coaster and Lexa was so wholly unprepared for her to appear when she did, Lexa’s head hit the back of her seat and she hasn’t stopped feeling dizzy for it since. 

She watches Clarke rest her sneaker on the worn, laminate cushion of the booth, a windbreaker—turquoise and blue with the logo of a brand Anya drools over when they drive to the outlets two towns over on the sleeve—over her t-shirt and jeans and she looks prettier now, drenched in weak Fall sunlight, with syrup on her fingers, than Lexa has ever seen her. Which includes the moments she’s spent sitting on the end of Lexa’s bed with her arms crossed over her pale-pink bra and her lip gloss on her chin, flushing prettily while Anya berated them for going at it too loudly. 

It's game day today—Fridays still don’t agree with her but they have gotten more manageable now that she has a reason to partake in the festivities, even if her reason is more the half-time show than the game itself—but Clarke has forgone her uniform for the morning at lease. Instead, it sits beside her in her gym bag, waiting until after her morning student council meeting to be put on and Lexa thinks she’s relieved. Not because she doesn’t like Clarke’s uniform but just the opposite.

“It’s a joke that that book spent a hundred days on the bestseller list,” she clears her throat, copying a problem from her textbook into her spiral, worried she’s thinking too loudly. When she looks up, Clarke has her cheek in her hand and is grinning at her. 

“What?” Lexa asks. 

“Nothing.” 

“Clarke.” 

“Nuh-uh.” 

Lexa nudges her under the table and Clarke squints at her happily. Her chin slides off the bracket of her palm and she sits up, placing her hands on either side of her plate of hotcakes as she leans over the table to kiss her—a sticky-sweet kiss that tastes like syrup and toothpaste somewhere beyond that. It’s slow and sweet, filling Lexa up with liquid sunshine from the pit of her belly to the top of her ears until all she can feel is Clarke’s grin against her mouth. She can hear footsteps somewhere beyond their booth—Gus probably—and when she starts paying attention again, back from the faraway planet that the feeling of Clarke beneath her fingers always sends her to, their teeth knock. 

Clarke leans back on her hands and Lexa goes to apologise when she sees her lips curl under her teeth. She smiles down at her breakfast—the picture of a naughty bashful school girl—as Gus meanders past with a rack of dirty mugs, doing his best imitation of ignorance. 

It isn’t convincing in the slightest. 

“You’re coming tonight, right?” Clarke asks when he’s gone, lowering herself back to her seat. One foot sits propped up on the bench of the booth and the other remains under the table to play footsie with Lexa’s.   

“If you want me to,” Lexa says softly as if worried if she speaks too loudly the sunshine will drain away and she will have to wait the minutes until Clarke sees fit to kiss her again, cold and sunshine-less. The thought almost doesn’t bear thinking about. It reminds her of the excruciating minutes between AP English and Biology—the only passing period in the school day when she and Clarke don’t manage to find each other—and it’s excruciating.   

“‘Course,” Clarke says executively. “We have to plan our costumes.” 

“Costumes?” 

“Costumes.” Clarke quirks her brow cheekily. 

A phone alarm goes off before Lexa can ask anymore and Clarke rummages through her backpack to silence it, checking the time as she does. “Shoot. I need to go.” She swings her backpack over her shoulder, then her gym bag and pries two ten dollar notes out of her bi-fold, handing them to Lexa as she slides out of the booth. 

“I’ll see you at lunch?” she asks, kissing Lexa on the cheek. 

“Yeah,” Lexa nods, then looks down at the money in her hand. It’s too much for breakfast. “Clarke—” 

“The tip’s for my waitress,” she grins, waving to Gus who looks up from where he’s studiously stacking glasses by the counter as she goes. “Tell her I think she’s cute.” 

* * *

Lexa isn’t nervous about the pumpkin patch until she hears people talking about it. 

(Well, that’s a lie, because the day she isn’t nervous about spending time with Clarke is the day that the stars descend from the heavens). 

When Clarke first brought it up over lunch with Octavia and Lincoln, it didn’t seem like it would be any different from their breakfasts at the diner or their study dates that turn very quickly from English to Biology of the kind that probably won’t be tested on the SATs. In fact, when she was younger she loved Halloween for that very reason. She remembers Anya saving quarters their parents gave her for taking out the trash to buy them tickets for the kid’s haunted hayride the Greens put on every year, presenting Lexa with her ticket and paper bag of candy corn like she was bestowing her sister a great honour. 

Then, Anya started the sixth grade and suddenly, the thought of a kid’s anything was morally reprehensible, let alone sitting in a moving vehicle for any length of time longer than the eight-minute drive to school. Lexa made a habit of being busy on Halloween after that. 

She thought the function of it remained the same though, no matter how many years she missed sitting in her room streaming Scream one through four on her laptop. Or at least she did until her calculus substitute let the class dissolve into a rapturous discussion of who had invited who to the pumpkin patch and, suddenly, it seemed like the most important thing in the world — more important than Spanish homework or SAT prep. 

It makes her panic as she stands in her room after school, surrounded by the casualties of an uncharacteristic rampage through her closet. The white and green of her Polis High School debate team has been relegated to beneath her bed. So has her track uniform and instead, every dress, skirt, shirt and sweater she owns lies trampled beneath her socked feet.

Lexa never saw herself as someone who would participate in the trashy, teen-film cliche of changing thirty-two times before going out but she thinks she understands the necessity of it now. This is a date — an honest to God date. Since Clarke asked her to the football game they’ve been falling into things without thinking about them — falling into hanging out after cheer practice, falling into eating in the cafeteria together at lunch, falling into the routine of having breakfast together at the diner on Friday morning while Lexa works a shift — but this is premeditated and it makes her nervous. 

In the end, she goes to Anya for help, who looks at Lexa past her mascara wand when she asks to borrow her clothes in the same way she would if Lexa told her she was quitting model UN to join the prom committee. 

“I thought you didn’t go out on Halloween,” she says, returning the wand to its tube and setting it on her vanity between a mug of makeup brushes and a jewellery stand. She has a t-shirt on and a towel wrapped around her head — halfway to getting ready for a date with Raven — and Lexa squirms in the doorway, looking for familiarity among the gauzy curtains and framed prints on the wall. She thinks she can see the edges of a mural they painted in elementary school hidden beneath the edge of an Urban Outfitters tapestry. 

“Clarke invited me to the pumpkin patch.” 

Anya doesn’t seem to need any more explanation than that. Her lips curl into a smile and she rises from her desk, herding Lexa towards her closet where she pulls two hangers off the rack and holds them up to her. After a moment, she puts them back, sending Lexa to her room for a pair of jeans and when Lexa returns, a tight, white longs-sleeve and a cable-knit jacket sit on the bed. She hands them both to Lexa, nodding in approval once she’s changed. 

It’s the most sisterly thing Lexa thinks they’ve done in a long time. Anya pulls the wrinkles out of her shirt and tucks the hem into Lexa’s jeans, maneuvering her in front of the mirror like she would when Lexa was seven years old and being bribed with Birthday Cake Pop-Tarts to be her dress-up doll. 

She sits down obediently on Anya’s desk chair when she’s asked, parting her lips for Anya to apply a coat of lip gloss she isn’t sure she asked for and staring at the join in the ceiling Anya points out as she pulls out a tube of mascara and, by the time she’s done, Lexa feels even more nervous than she did to start off with. 

“We don’t do this very much,” Anya says once she's satisfied with her handiwork and miming rubbing her lips together to blot the lip gloss. Lexa follows suit, looking past her sister at her own reflection in the mirror atop Anya’s dresser. 

“You’re busy I guess,” she shrugs, which isn’t exactly a lie, but it’s also the favourite excuse for not doing things in their family, from Sunday night dinners to the summer vacations they took annually before their father got promoted. 

They are busy though, Lexa reasons — Anya with cheerleading and Lexa with everything else — it’s OK not to be living in each other's pockets. They were close when they were younger — inseparable actually as if Anya was trying to make up for the fact that they were half-sisters by being twice as involved — but school only seemed to exacerbate the distance between them. 

“Not too busy to be your sister though,” Anya challenges, stern-faced and Lexa smiles in spite of herself. “OK?”

“OK,” Lexa nods, rolling her eyes as Anya chucks her chin. Her phone vibrates in her pocket and she fishes it out, reading Clarke’s message — ‘I’ll meet u at the diner after your shift <3’ — and smiling. 

When she looks up, Anya is watching her with a mixture of fondness and exasperation. She hands her the tube of lip gloss she used and flicks Lexa’s hair behind her ears before shooing her out of her room with a shake of her head and a “go meet your girlfriend, Lexa” and this time, Lexa complies. 

 

* * *

“Could I get two ciders please?” Clarke asks, leaning on the toes of her sneakers to reach the vendor, the sleeve of her jacket falling down her arm as she hands a twenty dollar note over the lip of the trailer’s window. 

(Strike breakfast, Lexa thinks, thoroughly flustered beneath Anya’s jacket and the thin layer of makeup her sister had insisted on, this is the prettiest Clarke has ever been. Lexa would trade this morning’s syrup-stick kisses for Clarke’s chapped cheeks and the palm of her free hand pressed flush to Lexa’s own any day).  

“I’ll pay!” She says, lunging forward and replacing Clarke’s rolled up note with one from her bi-fold, flattening it against the side of the truck before handing it over. 

“You don’t have to—” Clarke tries to argue, mouth thinning into a pout when Lexa bats her away and accepts two take-out cups and a paper bag of apple cider doughnuts that feel warm in her hands. 

“I got a big tip from a pretty girl today,” Lexa explains, shrugging as the wander back towards the picnic table Octavia has saved for them along the fence-line. 

“A pretty girl? Should I be worried?” Clarke teases. 

“Probably not,” Lexa reasons slyly, watching as Clarke drops her jaw in faux-outrage. 

“Watch it, Woods,” she says. “Or this’ll be the last time I invite you out on a nice date.” 

There’s that word again, Lexa thinks — date — and it makes her stomach knot even more than it already had on the twenty-minute drive here. 

This is certainly the most date-like that hanging out with Clarke has ever felt, from the way Gus had acted like a proud father hanging his daughter off to her homecoming date when Clarke came in to pick her up at the end of her shift — ‘your face,’ he’d said, pointing to the mascara on Lexa’s lashes and the shine of gloss on her lips, ‘you look…very grown-up’ — to the way they had driven here with their fingers linked over the gear stick. 

Even paying for Clarke’s drink feels oddly official — so far they’ve stuck to paying for their own meals at breakfast or football games, or if they share a milkshake they split the bill down the middle — and it’s scary in a way Lexa hasn’t quite found anything scary before. 

(It makes her feel grown-up when she thinks about it. Strangely permanent like none of her extracurriculars, good grades on the fridge or compliments from her parents ever have. Like, if she looks back at this moment in ten years, she will see herself here holding hands with Clarke beneath the Jack-O-Lantern lights and it will be as clear as it is to her now). 

“So’re we doing the maze?” Octavia asks eagerly as they sit down — Clarke sliding onto the bench on the same side as Lexa instead of opposite her as she would in a booth at the diner. It makes heat bloom through her body despite the evening chill. 

It’s nearly six o’clock now, and the string lights threaded overhead paints the twilight yellow and gold and flickering orange. To their left, the fields of pumpkins have almost fallen into darkness while, to their right, the Green’s barn is lit up, the lopsided scarecrow Lexa remembers from her childhood Halloweens sitting atop a pumpkin pyramid outside. 

Every few minutes a shrill scream will come from the direction of the maze and a terrified teenager will come running out of the exit, laughing and gasping for breath, happy to be back amongst the relative safety of the throng of families and little girls in Elsa dresses milling about in the light. 

Lexa doesn’t think any part of it appeals to her. She hasn’t stepped foot inside a haunted attraction since she was eight years old and facing her first Halloween without Anya’s coat sleeve to cling to — the jump scares in Scream are thrill enough for her — but when Clarke nods, and Octavia and Lincoln do too, she doesn’t have any choice but to say yes. 

Grinning, Clarke takes a sip of her cider before she slides a cold hand beneath Lexa’s jacket and fastens her fingers in her belt loop, leaning her head against Lexa’s shoulder. When she leans up a moment later to kiss Lexa gratefully she tastes like hot cider and allspice and the fake strawberry flavour of her lip balm Lexa has come to know.  

Words roll around in her head — words like date and girlfriend — but the longer she finds Clarke pressed against her, warm and real and present in a way Lexa never could have imagined her to be when she watched her sip her root beer floats from behind the counter on game days, the more she finds her fear draining away. By the time their ciders are finished and their doughnuts have been eaten and Lexa is standing in front of the maze, staring at the gruesome party store prop poised over the entrance, she doesn’t think it even existed in the first place.

“Are we doing it together or separately?” Lincoln asks, handing out the slips of paper and plastic Bic pens for the scavenger hunt. 

“Separately,” Octavia says immediately, sliding under her boyfriend’s arm in a way that makes Lexa think she’s going to use the opportunity to find a quiet annex on the far side of the maze and make out. 

“Don’t worry,” Clarke whispers when Lexa blanches at the thought — every horror movie ever made says splitting up in a corn maze is begging to be hunted down by a masked psychopath. “I’ll protect you.”

(It occurs to Lexa as she’s being pulled head-first through the darkness that she’ll never stop finding extenuating circumstances for Clarke).

(She doesn't think she'd have it any other way). 

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me on tumblr if you want to ([@clarketomylexa](https://clarketomylexa.tumblr.com/)) otherwise thanks for reading!


End file.
